THE PRESIDENT SAYS YES AND NO
It was not merely because the seventh commandment was negative, but because it was abstract that David found it so hard to keep. If the seventh commandment (like Uriah's wife) could have had deep blue eyes or could have been beautiful to look upon, and, on a particular day in a particular place, could have been bathing in a garden, David would have found keeping it a very different matter. The tendency to make a statue of purity as a lovely female figure carries us a little further in moral evolution, than the moral statement that Moses had managed to get, and it was further toward the concrete, but it was not far enough for a real artist or man who does things.
One of the things about the real artist that makes him an artist, is that he is always and always has been and always will be profoundly dissatisfied with a statue of a female figure as an emblem of purity. He challenges the world, he challenges God, he challenges himself, he challenges the men and women about him when he is being put off with a Statue as an emblem of purity. He demands, searches out, interprets, creates something concrete and living to express his idea of purity.
How can President Wilson, in getting the Trusts not to be corrupt, in trying to win them—how can President Wilson make the law alluring? How can he make the People have a Low Voice?
A great deal if not nearly everything depends in tempting business men to be good, upon the tone in which they are addressed. Every government, like every man, soon comes to have its own characteristic tone in addressing the people. And, as a matter of fact, it is almost always the tone in a government, like the voice in a man, which tells us the most definitely what it is like, and is the most intimate and effective expression of what it wants and is the most practical way of getting what it wants. Everybody has noticed that a man's voice works harder for him, works more to the point for him in getting what he wants than his words do. It is his voice that makes people know him, that makes them know he means what he says. It is his voice that tells them whether he is in the habit of meaning what he says, and it is his voice that tells them whether he is in habit of getting what he wants, and of knowing what to do with what he wants when he gets it.
A government does not need to say very much if it has the right tone.
The tone of a government is the government.
If President Wilson is going to succeed in tempting business men to be good, he is going to do it, some of us think, by depending on three principles.
These three principles, like all live, active principles, may be stated as three principles or as three personal traits.
First, by being affirmative. (Isaiah, in distinction from Moses.)